Taino is an Indigeneity movement. It encompasses a broad range of people throughout the Greater Caribbean islands and their populations in the United States and Canada. As a movement, for some 50 years, family and individual identity has gathered Taino communities of people with ancestral Indigenous roots.

Caribbean Indigenous revitalization represents kinship and consciousness connections to Indio legacies that have persisted among a broad range of Caribbean populations. It has manifested consistently in the United States since the 1970s among people from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and other places.

Linked with the islands and other places of origin in the vaivén, or the perpetual Caribbean–North America migration loop, Taíno identity revitalization has stimulated many threads of Indigeneity. Taino has gained persistent visibility, increasing in numbers, effect, and reach. Many families and individuals began to regroup and retribalize, forming in associations and yucayeques, or family-tribal groups.

Taino networks generate activities that range from culture and history gatherings and academic conferences to cultural recovery approaches in traditional music and dance, Taíno (insular Arawak) language appreciation and reconstruction, production of ceremonial instruments, featherwork, carving, basketry, and other arts and craft work. Among Dominicano tribes, Higuayawa hosts important scholarly and cultural gatherings.

The Taino movement directly challenged the dictum of “extinction” for Caribbean Indigenous people. This iron-clad assertion by scholars is even inscribed into law at various times and places. Beyond the decimation of the Native populations, the Spanish enforced a type of “whitening” of Indians, almost always linked to extinguishment of Native title to lands.

“Taino” emerged as a favorite term in the self-assertion of continuing Indigeneity. For more than 50 years it has become the favored term of self-ascription. It appears to best encompass the Indigenous descendant populations of the Caribbean, given the severe scattering of the Indigenous communities.

Coming just at a time when the countries of the Caribbean are confronted with massive cultural invasion, and with the intensifying destruction of their natural ecologies, the thrust of Indigenized identity has deepened and expanded. Particularly among Puerto Rican and Dominican groups, the Taíno movement emerges within a context of pronounced cultural identity revitalization and Indigenous rights.

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